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Triptych

From Atlanta's wealthiest suburbs to its stark inner-city housing projects, a killer has crossed the boundaries of wealth and race. And the people who are chasing him must cross those boundaries, too. Among them is Michael Ormewood, a veteran detective whose marriage is hanging by a thread and whose arrogance and explosive temper are threatening his career. And Angie Polaski, a beautiful vice cop who was once Michael's lover before she became his enemy.

The Stranger

The Stranger appears out of nowhere, perhaps in a bar or a parking lot or at the grocery store. His identity is unknown. His motives are unclear. His information is undeniable. Then he whispers a few words in your ear and disappears, leaving you picking up the pieces of your shattered world.

Suspect

LAPD cop Scott James is not doing so well, not since a shocking nighttime assault by unidentified men killed his partner, Stephanie, nearly killed him, and left him enraged, ashamed, and ready to explode. He is unfit for duty - until he meets his new partner. Maggie is not doing so well, either. The German shepherd survived three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan sniffing explosives before she lost her handler to an IED and sniper attack, and her PTSD is as bad as Scott’s. They are each other’s last chance.

The Prettiest One: A Thriller

When Caitlin Sommers finds herself alone in a deserted parking lot with blood on her clothes and no memory of the past few months, it seems like one of the nightmares that have tormented her for years...but it's all too real. Desperate to learn the truth about where she's been and what has happened to her but terrified of what she may find, Caitlin embarks on a search for answers.

Chiefs

In 1919, Delano, Georgia, appoints its first chief of police. Honest and hardworking, the new chief is puzzled when young men start to disappear. But his investigation is ended by the fatal blast from a shotgun. Delano's second chief-of-police is no hero, yet he is also disturbed by what he sees in the missing-persons bulletins. In 1969, when Delano's third chief takes over, the unsolved disappearances still haunt the police files.

Before He Finds Her

Everyone in the quiet Jersey Shore town of Silver Bay knows the story: on a Sunday evening in September 1991, Ramsey Miller threw a blowout block party, then murdered his beautiful wife and three-year-old daughter. But everyone is wrong. The daughter got away. Now she is nearly eighteen and tired of living in secrecy. Under the name Melanie Denison, she has spent the last fifteen years in small-town West Virginia as part of the Witness Protection Program. She has never been allowed to travel, go to a school dance, or even have internet at home. Precautions must be taken at every turn, because Ramsey Miller was never caught and might still be looking for his daughter.

Whiskey Beach

For more than 300 years, Bluff House has sat above Whiskey Beach, guarding its shore - and its secrets. But to Eli Landon, it’s home.… A Boston lawyer, Eli has weathered an intense year of public scrutiny and police investigations after being accused of - but never arrested for - the murder of his soon-to-be-ex wife. He finds sanctuary at Bluff House, even though his beloved grandmother is in Boston recuperating from a nasty fall. Abra Walsh is always there, though.

Girl Missing

She's young. She's beautiful. And her corpse, laid out in the office of Boston medical examiner Cat Novak, betrays no secrets - except for a notebook clutched in one stiff hand, seven numbers scrawled inside. When a second victim is discovered, Cat begins to fear that a serial killer is stalking the city streets: a shadowy madman without mercy or apparent motive. The police are sceptical. The mayor won't listen. And Cat's chief suspect is one of the city's most prominent citizens.

Still Missing

On the day she was abducted, Annie O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old Realtor, had three goals: sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend. The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she’s about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all.

Zero Day

From David Baldacci - the modern master of the thriller and number-one worldwide best-selling novelist - comes a new hero: a lone Army Special Agent taking on the toughest crimes facing the nation. John Puller is a combat veteran and the best military investigator in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigative Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable drive to find the truth.

Ashes to Ashes

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won't stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn't talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still.

The Sleeping Doll: A Novel

Ten years ago in California, Daniel Pell, a self-styled Charles Manson, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering an entire family: husband, wife, and two children, plus one of his young male followers. He is brought to Salinas, California, to interview with Kathryn Dance after he is implicated in yet another killing. Things go terribly wrong during an interview break, and Pell escapes, intent on killing again.

Fool Me Once

Former special ops pilot Maya, home from the war, sees an unthinkable image captured by her nanny cam while she is at work: her two-year-old daughter playing with Maya's husband, Joe - who had been brutally murdered two weeks earlier. The provocative question at the heart of the mystery: Can you believe everything you see with your own eyes, even when you desperately want to?

Blood Work

Thanks to a heart transplant, former FBI agent Terrell McCaleb is enjoying a quiet retirement, renovating the fishing boat he lives on in Los Angeles Harbor. But McCaleb's calm seas turn choppy when a story in the "What Happened To?" column of the LA Times brings him face-to-face with the sister of the woman whose heart now beats in his chest.

Where There's Smoke

No one knows why Lara Mallory opens up her medical practice in the rowdy Texas town where Tackett Oil owns everything. But everyone remembers her role in the well-publicized scandal that caused the downfall of White House hopeful Senator Clark Tackett. Now the ironfisted matriarch of Tackett Oil intends to use her money and power to drive Lara out of town...especially when Lara meets Key, the hell-raising, youngest Tackett son.

The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

It is a boiling summer in Boston. Adding to the city's woes is a series of shocking crimes that end in abduction and death. The pattern suggests one man: "The Surgeon," serial killer Warren Hoyt, known for his partial dissection of his victims, and recently thrown behind bars. Police can only assume an acolyte is at large, a maniac basing his attacks on the twisted medical techniques of the madman he so admires.

Still Life: Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 1

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it’s a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.

The Kind Worth Killing

On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted Severson meets the stunning and mysterious Lily Kintner. Sharing one too many martinis, the strangers begin to play a game of truth, revealing very intimate details about themselves. Ted talks about his marriage that's going stale and his wife, Miranda, who he's sure is cheating on him. Ted and his wife were a mismatch from the start - he the rich businessman, she the artistic free spirit - a contrast that once inflamed their passion but has now become a cliché.

The Quiet Game

When former prosecutor Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, he doesn't find the peace he desperately craves. He finds that his own father is being blackmailed by a corrupt ex-cop. And when Penn investigates, he uncovers a murderous secret - and the small town's violent past.

The One That Got Away

Graduate students Zoë and Holli only mean to blow off some steam on their road trip to Las Vegas. But something goes terribly wrong on their way home, and the last time Zoë sees her, Holli is in the clutches of a sadistic killer. Zoë flees with her life, changed forever.

The Obsession

Naomi Bowes lost her innocence the night she followed her father into the woods. In freeing the girl trapped in the root cellar, Naomi revealed the horrible extent of her father's crimes and made him infamous. Now a successful photographer living under the name Naomi Carson, she has found a place that calls to her, thousands of miles away from everything she's ever known. Naomi wants to embrace the solitude, but the residents of Sunrise Cove keep forcing her to open up - especially the determined Xander Keaton.

The Heist: A Novel

FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare is known for her fierce dedication and discipline on the job, chasing down the world’s most wanted criminals and putting them behind bars. Her boss thinks she is tenacious and ambitious; her friends think she is tough, stubborn, and maybe even a bit obsessed. And while Kate has made quite a name for herself for the past five years the only name she’s cared about is Nicolas Fox - an international crook she wants in more ways than one.

The Gray Man

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man - a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness. Now, he is going to prove that for him, there's no gray area between killing for a living-and killing to stay alive.

The Cuckoo's Calling

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: his sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

Publisher's Summary

Karin Slaughter's new thriller is an epic tale of love, loyalty, and murder that encompasses 40 years, two chillingly similar murder cases, and a good man's deepest secrets.

Will Trent is a brilliant agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Newly in love, he is beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and he is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, deputy director Amanda Wagner. Will cannot fathom Amanda's motivation, until the two of them literally collide in an abandoned orphanage they have both been drawn to for different reasons. Decades before - when Will's father was imprisoned for murder - this was his home…

Flash back nearly 40 years. In the summer Will Trent was born, Amanda Wagner is taking her first steps in the boy's club that is the Atlanta police department. One of her first cases is to investigate a brutal crime in one of the city's worst neighborhoods. Amanda and her partner, Evelyn, are the only ones who seem to care if an arrest is ever made. Now the case that launched Amanda's career has suddenly come back to life, and it is intertwined with the long-held mystery of Will's birth and parentage. And they will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed on Atlanta today.

For Karin Slaughter fans, this book provides the "backstory" for critical recurring characters, including revelation of the links that are implied in previous books, but not defined. This particular tale, bouncing back and forth from past to present, does a wonderful job of more fully developing the players we thought we knew. And, of course, the reader also is hooked into following the search, through time, for a heinous killer. Narration is excellent. I like to finish the "listening" and, in talking about the book to others, can't remember whether it was one I read or enjoyed on Audible! This book does not disappoint.

My heart is still thumping as I pull my mind back from the dark recesses where it has been dwelling the past 15 hours...this is the stuff from which nightmares are borne. Karin Slaughter is one of our best. With her crackling originality and vivid details, she once again creates characters and events that you think could be out your own newspaper - and pray they aren't.

Followers of Slaughter will recognize this as part of the Will Trent series, something I did not know; there was no mention of "series" in the publisher's summary. But this story easily stands on its own and should not be passed by if you are worried about sequence. I speak from experience: I noticed that I'd read 2 of the books years ago and had no idea they were a series. With that said, I'm sure there is information that would have been good to have, and I am tinged green with envy of the devout followers of the Will Trent books; I can only imagine the great satisfaction this long awaited tell-all will bring to them. (I'm even considering picking up the between rerads, here's the order: Triptych, Fractured, Undone, Broken, Fallen, & Criminal).

Detective Will is baffled when his hard-nosed boss Amanda restricts him from the case of a missing girl. To Amanda, there is something eerily familiar and threatening with this case, and when the brutalized bodies start to show up, she knows she is on a collision course with Will -- a collision full of dark secrets that has been 40 years in the making --and she isn't sure she wants to reveal the answers. "Sometimes it's criminal what a woman has to do..."

One of the great mechanisms Slaughter uses is starting this book with a quiet prelude of sorts, a reverent requiem. She introduces us to Lucy,we witness her -- the young daughter full of promise, the little sister, the insecurities and drug use to control her adolescent weight -- we watch her downward slide -- the predictable addiction, string of abusive boyfriends, and eventual plunge into prostitution. Slaughter creates a human being; Lucy is a person rather than just another wretched addicted prostitute. This approach creates an emotional bond to the victims, and explains deputy director Amanda's bulldog determination, and humanity.

The story is told in a series of flashbacks, back to the 70's when Amanda was a novice detective, fighting her first case, pitted against a squad of resentful sexist males that don't want the girls around. (Remember "male chauvanist pig"?) The resistance is abussive and hard edged.The men crassly refer to she and her partner as the "slits", and at one point, when the ladies call in for back-up on Cherry Street, the male dispatcher remarks, "What's that? You want to give me your cherry." This treatment, plus the horror she witnesses in her first case bely how tough Amanda will have to become.

One noticeable change in style is Slaughter's handling of the nauseous gore.(Something that kept me from picking up another Slaughter book after I'd read 2.) Instead of her ususal in your face detail, she presents the grossities more like a quick visual spanning of crime scene photos, allowing the listener to fill in the blanks. The change doesn't affect the jolt...the story is still tight and tense with layer upon layer of pulse-pounding apprehension. The edge-of-your-seat anxiety reminded me of The Silence of the Lambs, and the creepiest deviant ever created, Buffalo Bill. The monster in Criminal is reminiscent of Bill (and they share an affinity with needles and thread...). I would have liked to see Slaughter pry into this psycho's sick mind, and think she may have missed a chance for the psychological underpinning that could have made this ghoul memorable and kept this story forever in our minds. (But do we really want that haunting us?)

I couldn't put my earbuds down--the pace was exhilarating, the execution of the narration very very good. Though harsh, I don't recall a lot of foul language, but the intense scenes may have kept my mind from noticing particular words. The flashbacks help build some backstory and character development for those just jumping into this story, but you have to pay close attention or you can lose track of which era you're in. If like me, you've been craving a smart thriller, and you don't mind a few nightmares, this may be your book. Highly recommend to fans of hard- hitting criminal thrillers.

I pretty much devoured the Will Trent books. Slaughter is really good...I mean wow, she is so descriptive and really masterful at weaving the lives of the main characters throughout the series. My only beef is that...the narrator of Fallen was horrible. I didn't quite care for the change-up from a male to female voice in the earlier books but could understand why the change was necessary in conjunction with the themes and central story tellers in each book. It was the change from one woman to another woman between Broken and Fallen...I really didn't like that at all. Natalie Ross (Undone and Broken) was so good at switching from male to female tone which was really important to understand the dialogue between Will and Faith or Will and Amanda, etc., Ross nailed Trent's voice so perfectly and then Shannon Cochran ruins it all in Fallen, which happens to be my least favorite of the series...I wonder why??? Still not as good as Ross, Kathleen Early (Criminal) was leaps and bounds better than Cochran. Criminal is an amazing book...almost nothing could ruin it. Great series.

While I haven't yet read any of the previous books in the "Will Trent" Triptych, I have been intrigued by his character in other books ("Fallen" and "Undone"). Ms. Slaughter is masterful in revealing the mystery of Will's past, slowly but inexorably leading the listener/reader to a horrifying discovery. The compassion extended toward Will by Sarah Linton is lovely and believable. The story of Amanda Wagner and Evelyn Mitchell's early days as detectives in a misogynistic police department rings true. Set in 1974 and 1975, this part of the book is woefully believable. Nothing in the book is too soft, nor does anything feel contrived. Perhaps the "detecting" part of the story is a bit too convoluted but it all hangs together. The last words are cliff hangers... Kathleen Early is an excellent narrator. All in all, highly recommended.

What a great book. Never ending storyline, past & present with lots of twists & turns. Brilliantly written & preformed. An endearing love story in the mix, emphasizing that good people will embrace your life & push out the evil it you let them.

Loved this story. I couldn't stop listening. Fortunately I was on a long road trip and it kept me engaged the entire trip. The narrator did an awesome job. Her voices were believable and even with male voices it was easy to "see" the characters. I loved hearing the backstory and Will and Amanda's lives. I've already recommended this book to several friends.

This one took some intestinal fortitude - - I literally listened to parts of it while squirming in discomfort. But, even given that, she's such a good writer and the characters so interesting you cannot help but to appreciate and excellent writing style. The characters are facing down their pasts and, like so many of us as we face the future, willing to risk everything to make what has happened to us palatable. I did at one point worry that this was the case where a woman writer was deliberately overly graphic so she could be one of the "boys," but I realized that I was being sexist and unfair since violence and evil don't give much regard for gender, and the author was being true to the story. Good for you, sister. The narrator is also first rate and subtly changed the voices to make the story really flow smoothly. I hadn't a clue this was part of a series and didn't miss any references because of it. I will, however (after I screw up some more courage), listen to more of this author's works.